Something Worth Doing Page 25

  Harvey harrumphed. “What do they know out there. Do they even read the newspapers, find out what’s happening around the world?”

  “Perhaps if they had free high school education, more would be better informed.”

  “Don’t go there, Abigail.” Harvey pointed his finger at her. Rage filled his eyes.

  He’s frightening me. “I’m more distressed than you are. To spend my whole life on something and have it defeated? You can still run for the Senate whenever you want. But our work means slogging through two more sessions if we are to continue the fight. Maybe I’ll move to Washington. It’s a big territory. Did I tell you they invited me to run for governor?”

  He guffawed. “That’ll be retracted when they realize how inept you are in understanding the electorate. They’ll likely repeal the woman vote anyway.”

  “Why didn’t you repeat your support? Your November editorial made my heart sing, made all suffragists celebrate. You have so much influence.”

  He glared at her. “Do you have any idea how many letters the paper received after that . . . that . . . lapse on my part?”

  “Lapse? But the argument was well written, wise. When women do get the vote, and we will one day, they’d vote for you when you run.” She saw a flash of pain cross his eyes, his own political career careening out of his control. “We Scotts don’t like to lose, do we?”

  “This vote was not my loss.”

  “No. It’s mine. I’m devastated. But I am grateful that your Oregonian—you—supported it, once. I just didn’t understand why you stayed neutral at the eve of the election, printing as many negative letters as those in support. Yes, I counted. The greatest newspaper in the Northwest stayed neutral.” She sighed. “I came to thank you for that early support and ask for it again as we move forward.”

  “It will never happen again, dear Sister. Never. Ever. Ever. From here on in, I stand with the majority of men in this state and never, do you hear me, will I write an editorial in support of the woman vote. In fact, I will confess my error and write editorials to defeat any future attempt. If you continue this fight, you will do so without my backing, and I will do everything I can do to defeat it.” He spoke to the window, then turned to face her. “I had to convince my board. And now, I have to wear my shame. Now go. I don’t want to see your face here again begging for my support for anything. Ever.”

  Her steps from Harvey’s office were heavy. She was grateful for a cab close by to take her home. Old confetti from the anti-suffrage crowd scattered in the streets. Her life’s work, ended. Her relationship, such as it was with her brother, broken like a cane. She thought she could go no lower.

  “We can’t sell the paper,” Ben said. “It’s our livelihood. We have children employed by it.” Their three oldest sons were engaged in some aspect of the business and the younger boys hoping for professions that would require they attend eastern schools. The paper was needed to support them. And Ben’s job was here in Portland. The cause that defined her life, it was here. No, there was no rest ahead in Idaho.

  She thought of other times of despair. When her mother had died. When her brother had passed. When her father had the crisis of marriage. She had gotten up from those days realizing that when fatigue settled in, the worst thing one could do was to take a nap. Better was to increase her curiosity, expand her effort, multiply the time she spent in educating both men and women to the importance of the climb toward the peak of justice. It was what she’d done when Ben signed the notes and they’d lost the farm. It was that disaster that had spurred them on to new things: she’d begun the school, the millinery, and found suffrage as a life’s mission.

  “The only thing to displace the bitterness of defeat is the taste of victory.” Abigail heard herself say those words even though she wasn’t sure she believed them anymore. “We begin again. Grief cannot hold us back. We are wiser but not worn down. Let us ponder what we know, and come next week with new strategies that might very well mean putting a wolf in sheep’s clothing into Harvey Scott’s shed.”

  “Rather than a wolf,” Kate said, “we need a shepherd.”

  “With a shepherd’s staff to gently, diplomatically, bring in the fold,” Fanny added. She winked at her sister.

  “That leaves me out,” Abigail said to the knowing laughter of her siblings.

  But she was also out of this campaign. She was tired. She would use her words to inspire, to further the cause in her newspaper, but perhaps it was time for her to step aside. Her heart wasn’t in it anymore.

  The women began again with letter campaigns and meetings, speeches and sparring, without Abigail’s enthusiasm. She worked on her novel, meddled a little in her sons’ lives—Hubert had fallen for one of the boardinghouse girls but had proposed to another. She hovered over Ben, who suggested when she was asked, that she make the trip back east through the snows of the spring of ’85. “It’ll do you good. You’ll come back ready to take up the mantle.”

  “I’m still carrying it.”

  “You are. But you’re not meeting with legislators, pressing your still hunt. Maybe you should be.”

  She made the trip meant to negotiate a truce between warring factions of associations working toward suffrage passage and seeing—with horror—the growing influence of prohibitionists attaching themselves to suffrage. It pleased her that she was asked to be the diplomat. Even Susan B. Anthony felt the causes must join hands, the position causing the two old friends to disagree. But in Abigail’s fifteen hundred miles of travel and forty-nine speeches given nationally, she could see that linking these two great causes would doom them both.

  What she also found was that she came alive with the challenge; doing something worthy beyond her own life and family invigorated. She loved the travel. Oh, the coaches were uncomfortable and the trains cold as winter through the mountains at night. And the porters weren’t always quick to pick up her bags, even when they saw she used her cane. The Washington, DC, hotel she stayed in often had mice, and the different foods in Philadelphia made her stomach queasy. But in both places, she felt the stirrings of liberty, of what must have driven the Founding Fathers to risk everything for a new nation. Her writing was better from these places, and her words soared when she spoke in the churches and halls, bringing news of the forward-thinking West—Washington Territory’s advancement especially—to the burdened East. She never doubted on those days that she was doing the Lord’s work, lifting the downtrodden, visiting women in jails, freeing the spirits of all beings of God’s creation. She gained fuel for the fight when she traveled. Returning, she felt the old stirring. Things didn’t always turn out well, as Ben proposed, but some things were worth doing, regardless. There was another campaign to wage.

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Things That Sustain

  1885

  _______

  “A little old age, Ma,” Willis had said.

  “How old is he?” Hubert’s wife asked.

  “Barely fifty-five,” Abigail said. “He worries me.”

  “He seems to know details of the past.” Wilke bit a radish, crunched it.

  “Yes, but what he did yesterday or even a moment ago escapes him.” Abigail sighed. “The other day, he stood right next to me when Clara Belle was here telling us that she and Don and Earl were considering moving back to Oregon.”

  “I wonder why they’d do that?” Hubert said.

  “We chatted about it. Little Earl didn’t look well, if you ask me, but she said it had to do with Don’s work, whatever that is. The man is so elusive. Ben was there, heard it all. Clara Belle walked away, and I said to him, ‘Won’t that be lovely if Clara Belle and Earl come back home?’ and he said, ‘Clara Belle’s moving home? Why didn’t I know about that?’ I mean, he had been listening to the conversation. Not thirty seconds had passed.”

  Into the silence that followed, Hubert said, “That is concerning. But he’s no trouble, really, is he, Ma? He takes care of his needs. And it’s only temporary. It’s just a quirk,
maybe. Of old age.”

  “He’s tidy about his person, as always. Dignified in that.” She felt torn between a growing interest in getting back into the arena while watching Ben wane. “I worry that he might get lost if he goes out alone. And there’s his job. How long will he be able to keep it? And he asks me repeated questions. I’m not much for patience, you know.”

  “You might have to stay home a little more, Ma.”

  A leaf falling from a tree to the forest floor would have been louder than the silence that followed Willis’s observation.

  “You might have to sell a few more subscriptions,” she snapped back. Inside, Abigail felt her throat close. How can I be so unloving as to fear more time with Ben? And why does suffrage work offer more sustenance than caring for a loving man? She used the travel to escape; she could see that now. Ben had recognized it before she had. And he’d encouraged it. He knew her better than she knew herself.

  He had treated it with hot lemon. For months. Don Stearns had seen the symptoms, he told Ben and Abigail, and thought that it was a deep cold from the vapors off Lake Camus where he’d moved his little family.

  “But you’re still living in that swamp. If you had but told me, we would have gotten a doctor there or brought you all here. Sooner. How could you not see it was consumption?”

  She had to find someone to blame. Had to. Her daughter was dying and there was nothing she could do about it.

  She picked up doilies from the back of the horsehair couch, smoothed them, moved them, her fingers hopelessly busy over nothing. This inability to make things happen—to improve Ben’s memory, protect her daughter, gain the vote for women after all her effort, sacrifice, and yes, time away from family—her life was as useless as these doilies.

  “Maybe I’ll recover, Momma.” Clara Belle hacked out the words, the act of talking bringing on a wracking cough that brought pain to Clara’s face and to Abigail’s heart.

  “Of course you will. You must. If only we’d known. We could have found a mountain place with pure air to bring you healing. Why didn’t you write, Clara?” She turned to her son-in-law. “Why didn’t you?” She ignored the tears he brushed from his cheeks, didn’t give him a chance to defend. “You . . . you need to go, Don. I can barely stand the sight of you. Earl will stay here. He needs to be close to his mother now, emotionally, if not able to touch and hold her.”

  “It would be better if he came home with me. He’s my son.”

  “No. We need to watch for symptoms for him. It’s clear your diagnostic abilities are lacking.”

  “As are your mothering aptitudes,” he choked out.

  Abigail gasped. “How dare—”

  “Jenny . . .” Ben reached for her hand.

  “I brought Clara here at her insistence, but I’ll not give up Earl.”

  “Please.” Clara Belle coughed. She turned her eyes toward her father. “Don’t let them argue.” Her lips tinted blue with the effort to stay her shallow breath.

  Ben was having one of his good days. “Jenny, Clara Belle doesn’t need any more troubling.” He sat on a chair beside the daybed she lay on, the very one he’d rested on after the horse accident while they all listened to her playing the piano. No more. “What would please you, Daughter? To have Earl here?” She nodded yes. “And Don?” She hesitated but nodded yes to that as well. “Son, you are welcome to stay.”

  “Ben.”

  He raised his hand to silence Abigail. To the Stearns family members, he said, “Jenny’s grieving. She has a sharp tongue sometimes, but it’s how she plugs the hole of pain. If you want to be here with Clara Belle, you’re welcome. No need to separate the family.”

  Abigail snorted, but she saw the pleading look upon her daughter’s face, and she inhaled. “You can remain. Of course. All of you.”

  Don’s eyes were on Clara Belle. “I fear our feuding would bring you stress. I’ll come often. I promise.”

  Abigail couldn’t let Don be the better person. “Ben’s right. What matters now is Clara’s peace and healing. We can pray and hope,” she said. “You’re welcome here, Don.”

  “Then we’ll stay for you, Clara Belle.”

  A feeble smile crossed her daughter’s face. She pressed her hands in prayer and nodded to him, her mother, and then to her father. Speaking was simply too tiring. Abigail could see that, and she’d need to remember it, not upset her daughter. It only made her weaker.

  And yet her outrage at Don for not calling a doctor, for waiting so long, for taking her away from them those years before and the piercing sorrow of such an imminent loss as a child’s death would not be enough to caution her every time. She would rail at this man who, like Maggie’s husband, had ignored the signs of illness until too late. The very sight of him would bring out the worst in her.

  “I’ve got to make that meeting back east,” Abigail told Ben that evening.

  “You can’t leave. Not now.”

  “You’re a greater comfort to her than I am. You and the boys. She said to me, ‘You have a mission, Ma.’ She understands.”

  “Not just for her sake, Abigail. But for yours, you should be here. You could read your latest novels to her. She’ll enjoy hearing Hubert’s wife giving piano lessons, just as she once did, and you can enjoy the music too.”

  “I feel helpless here, and frankly, the very sight of Don . . .”

  Ben patted her back, then took her into his arms. “My Jenny. How you miss the things nearby. Can’t you see there is no real joy in the things afar?”

  “You’re remembering that little autograph book poem. The second line though is ‘Not what we seem, but what we are.’ I’m not the loving parent that you are, Ben. I’m a demanding, domineering, controlling—”

  “Stop. Don’t punish yourself that way. Who you are is a devoted, benevolent, and loving mother who pushes grief away. Didn’t you read to me what Shakespeare wrote, that one should give sorrow words?”

  She nodded, tears dampening his shirt.

  “It was something about if you don’t speak what your heart feels, it will break. Silence isn’t always a good thing, if I recall it.”

  “Yes. Macbeth. But when I speak, it comes out stinging. I’m better to be away, Ben. You’re here. You’ll comfort her. The things afar will bring me consolation in the end.”

  “No. They won’t.”

  Abigail packed her bags while Ben sang old songs to Clara Belle. Earl watched as Abigail folded her dresses, put her curling iron, powders, and perfume into the burgundy bag she had carried with her through the years. “You look after your grandpa now, you hear? Make sure he doesn’t go outside without his coat. Evenings can get cold. Will you remember that?”

  Earl nodded. She hugged him, his thin little shoulders like a bird’s frame. She would fatten him up when she came back. She knew when she returned, all would be different, but she would do all she could to keep Earl with them. She had to. His father lacked the proper judgment to raise a child. Anyone could see that. It would comfort Clara Belle in the hereafter to know that her son was safe. She had already begun that campaign by letting Don and Earl remain and removing herself as a point of contention so her daughter wasn’t disturbed in the last days of her life. One had to begin a campaign for change long before one thought one should.

  Abigail found little peace in this latest trip back east. The division between temperance and suffrage and prohibition swirled around the eastern cities and in the halls of women gathering. When asked to speak, she sounded defensive, she knew, but she’d been accused of taking money from the liquor industry—she hadn’t. Her having championed the plight of a brewer’s widow in Walla Walla, Washington, a story she’d told in her speech, had gotten her labeled as a traitor to the cause of controlling the blight of alcohol, betraying the temperance movement. Her colleagues couldn’t seem to understand that she cared about the property rights of women too, not only their right to vote. She supported even widows of brewers who’d been left with debt by a brewer husband. Abigail advoc
ated helping the woman turn the brewery into a cannery or develop another kind of business that would help the community and this woman. But no, because she was associated with hops and foam, Abigail was labeled as a traitor.

  She penned a letter to Shirley.

  The hardest thing is that I’m supposed to be a communicator, someone who, with written and spoken word, can express difficult perspectives facing us. But I am failing at this. I can’t seem to find the handle of this pot so that I can remove it from the heat. I fear Washington Territory will repeal the vote for women because our fair sex are indeed voting for prohibition.

  I am lonely here in this eastern city of government, sitting on a park bench beneath a canopy of trees. I am misunderstood and I begin to see that it is my own fault. But I lack the wisdom, my dear friend, to know what to do about it. And my usual rebirth is clouded with grief for Clara Belle’s impending death, for all I didn’t do and might have and now it’s too late. I can only pray that one day I will find a way to be understood, by myself, if not by those around me.

  It happened that Abigail was home when Clara Belle breathed her last; Don wasn’t there. He’d gone back to Washougal to tend to business, and so on that late January day in 1886, Abigail sat stern-faced as Ben sang “Rock of Ages” to his daughter. Clara Belle’s eyes were closed with the smallest flutter of her eyelids now and then to suggest that she heard. And then the certainty of it caught Abigail by the throat, her sob swallowed so as not to have Clara hear it. She held her daughter’s hand, rubbed her palm, and prayed, oh she prayed! Her brothers sat around the bed, heads bowed, hands clasped between their knees. Hubert’s wife accompanied Ben’s singing, and he looked strong beside Clara and her labored breathing, and Abigail prayed that her daughter’s suffering would end soon, as the pain of watching, listening, of powerlessness wore upon them as the coming of a heavy storm.

  She had thought once that losing the vote had been like losing a child. It was nothing like it. Outliving the flesh of one’s flesh was a grief like no other. There was no map to follow, no way to get over the pain, only try to find a way through. She and Ben and the mothers and fathers of deceased children walked in a wilderness, far away from any promised land.